Next Falcon 9 Rocket to Attempt Water Landing

in space on 2014-02-21 20:40 (#3EN)

The wonderful nasaspaceflight.com reports that the next flight of the Falcon 9 rocket will attempt a soft water landing. The goal is to test the newly installed legs and confirm that the rocket can touch down in a controlled manner before future attempts at a landing on solid ground. The flights main mission is to resupply the ISS using the Dragon spacecraft. If all goes according to schedule, which it rarely does in the launch industry, liftoff will happen on March 16th.

Re: Reusability is really, really hard. (Score: 2, Interesting)

by danieldvorkin@pipedot.org on 2014-02-22 15:40 (#4Q)

>I'm more concerned with how the stage as a whole will deal with multiple cycles through the transonic re-entry regime and with landing system.

Yeah. That. The engines are tough--they have to be--but I can easily envision a scenario where perfectly good engines rip themselves out of an overstressed airframe (spaceframe?) that developed some kind of undectable fatigue over the course of multiple launches.